E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Is Akismet broken again?

In the past 24 hours I've seen a wave of comment spam resembling the late August outage. Mostly porn spam. Is it just me? I'm using the Akismet API from my homebrew code (negatives are simply rejected), but maybe this is a sign that I should start using the feedback part of their API to report false negatives.

This also gets me thinking about the need for an Akismet-like service that is run cooperatively, with multiple servers to avoid the single-point-of-failure problem. (And maybe more liberal licensing.) I think Akismet is cool; it's just impossible not to think about The Next Cool Thing once the Current Thing starts giving you trouble.

Update, 2006-09-18: Akismet does seem to be working again now. I still just trash any comment it thinks is spam (along with displaying a notice), but I added some logging to track the action better.

Thursday, September 7th, 2006
+ +
2 comments

Some related posts: Comment Spam Stats • Comment Spam • Spam, del.icio.us spam • Akismet anti-comment-spam • More on "Splogs" • Fixing Web Spam • Google blog search
• Comment from Heliologue, 6 days later

It's not just you. I'm having the same problem. But it's apparently not so severe or widespread as the August outage, because I haven't seen very many people talking about it.

• Comment from Paul, 6 days later

Well, I'm glad it's not just me -- thanks. It may not be an outage at all, but the beginning of serious gaming by the spammers.

It's foul stuff, too!

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